Friday, July 11, 2008

Stage Seven: Brioude to Aurillac

A big group of 61 riders crossed the line today at 21:53 after the stage-winning rider. Lanterne RougeWim Vansevenant of Silence-Lotto crossed the line just before them at 20:16, not far behind teammate Johan Van Summeren (who crashed on a descent).

It was a bad day for several riders - Manuel Beltran of Liquigas was pulled from the race for a positive EPO "A" test from stage one after finishing 33rd for the stage (26th overall), and there were four abandons:

166 JEGOU Lilian (FRA) FRANCAISE DES JEUX withdrawal121 MOREAU Christophe (FRA) AGRITUBEL withdrawal106 GADRET John (FRA) AG2R-LA MONDIALE withdrawal95 FACCI Mauro (ITA) QUICK STEP withdrawalAccording to the Cyclingnews coverage: Moreau attacked and was dropped on one of the first climbs at about 85 km into the stage, and abandoned at 96 km (but had not crashed). Facci abandoned at some point before that. Gadret abandoned at about 110 km in the stage/49 km to go.

Former Lanterne Rouge (2006, stage 4) Magnus Backstedt of Garmin-Chipotle was eliminated for finishing outside the time limit for the stage.

The last four riders in the standings (with 170 riders left in the race) remain mostly the same - although Nicki Sorensen of CSC-Saxo has moved up to 141st overall, and the margin between the last two riders has decreased to 33 seconds:

Have fun in your race; I don't know whether to encourage you to go for the lanterne rouge or not.

My cutoff time calculator failed miserably in this stage -- the actual cutoff time was reportedly 4:20:50, and Sanchez finished in 3:52:53, so it appears the actual percentage was about 11. This makes no particular sense -- if the stage was category 1, the winning speed of about 41 kph should have given a percentage of about 8, while if it was category 2, the percentage should have been 16 or 17. I have a feeling that there's a lot of latitude for the whims of the judges.